Soup the Comic Strip by Alun Clewe
About
Archive
Forum
About
Archive
Forum
Comic strip for September 19 2023.
PANEL ONE: The champion talks to Erlak as the rat looks on. CHAMPION: So I ask the god of soup for a mount, and he gives me a rat... How does that work, exactly? PANEL TWO: Close on Erlak ERLAK: Well, you see, Tfylaon the Rat Goddess had a lot of hungry worshippers who needed food. I did a favor for her; she did a favor for me. That's the way things work with the gods. PANEL THREE: Erlak and the champion look at each other in silence. PANEL FOUR: Same arrangement as Panel Three, except now they're talking. CHAMPION: So you're saying gods are basically just really powerful politicians. ERLAK: Pretty much. Except we don't have to run for reelection.
September 19 2023

Hm. I don't think I thought through this when I first wrote this strip twenty-three years ago—or maybe this did occur to me but I figured it wasn't worth dwelling on—but of course Erlak's line in the last panel implies that elected officials exist on this world. Now, later on in the strip we'll see kings and princesses and lords (well, at least one of each, but possibly more later, I guess), which are generally not elected positions, but I guess the fact that some nations are ruled by monarchies does not necessarily preclude other nations having more democratic governments. Or there could be some local officials who are elected by the people, I guess.

The main thing working against this idea is that, well, I'm not sure it fits the feel of the world. When I first created Soup, I wanted to avoid making it a typical fantasy world, with elves and dwarves and orcs and dragons. I don't think, though, that I really succeeded. Sure, there are no elves or dwarves or orcs or dragons (I'll come back to that in a couple of weeks), but aside from that what we see of the world is pretty much bog standard fantasy. Just like every other typical fantasy world, it's set in some quasi-medieval land with quasi-medieval architecture and quasi-medieval clothing and a quasi-medieval feudal government, with castles and taverns and roaming adventurers. And even if we grudgingly grant that most characters apparently talk in modern English, or at least their speech has been translated into modern English for the benefit of the reader, and so the word "politician" may arguably not itself be out of place, the concept of democratically elected leaders does seem to be.

Or is it? Because sure, all that's true of the parts of the world that we see, but, again, that doesn't necessarily mean it's true of other parts we haven't seen. Maybe there are other parts of the world that deviate more from the generic fantasy template, and maybe there are places that do have democratically elected governments. And maybe I'll explore some of those other places in later strips.

Or maybe I won't. I don't know.

As a side note, I remembered making a similar observation in the commentary of a strip during the original run, though I didn't remember whether it was this strip, and that I wrote something about how it wasn't exactly an anachronism because this comic didn't necessarily take place in a different time, but on a different world, and that I coined a word for something that was, well, like an anachronism but for worlds instead of times. And I went looking for the post in question (because in the original version of the site all the strip commentaries, which I then called news posts, were actually saved on the site as separate text files, and I still have at least some of those files), and I found it, and... wow, I, uh, really kind of rambled on about this. But as it turned out it wasn't this strip specifically that originally triggered that discussion, so I'll hold off on delving further into it until I get to the strip that did.